Pod Save America - Democrats Go Off In An Off Year

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Democrats worry about the debt ceiling deal Joe Biden might make with Kevin McCarthy. The party gets good news in Tuesday’s elections. Ron Desantis will announce his presidential run next week because he’s tired of the Republican culture of losing. And the most definitive report on the 2022 midterms give us clues about the 2024 electorate. Then Democratic messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio stops by to talk about  how Dems should be talking about the budget negotiations. And Jon and Dan play another round of Take Take Don’t Tell Me. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Democrats worry about the debt ceiling deal Joe Biden might make with Kevin McCarthy, but the party gets good news in Tuesday's elections. Ron DeSantis will announce next week because he's tired of the Republican culture of losing. And the most definitive report on the 2022 midterms gives us clues about the 2024 electorate. Then, Dan talks to Democratic messaging guru Anat Shinker-Osorio about smart economic messaging and how Democrats should be talking about the debt ceiling.

And since Elijah Cohn is here with us in studio in Los Angeles, we're going to play a round of Take, Take, Don't Tell Me. But first, to all the Dan stans, that's what my housekeeping says. I don't even know what's coming next. I'm worried. To to all the dance stands in case you missed the tuesday pod we've got a big announcement crooked subscription community friends of the pod is finally here you can

subscribe at crooked.com slash friends for subscriber only bonus content exclusive access and more i guess we thought there's some people who just listened to the Thursday pod and not the Tuesday pod. I mean, you have access to the analytics dashboard. I don't, so that could be the case. I don't know. Don't tell us. Don't tell us if you're one of those people.

We don't want to start anything. If you would rather I just text my family members, I can do that as well. That was a more efficient way of doing this. Also, what happens when a mysterious stranger comes to town with a wild idea that weed can solve

all the city's problems? This is not about Elijah being here this week. This is about Dreamtown, the story of Adelanto, Crooked's newest podcast and an official selection at this year's Tribeca Festival.

Listen to the Dreamtown trailer now and you can subscribe to hear the first episodes on June 7th wherever you get your podcasts. Dreamtown trailer now, and you can subscribe to hear the first episodes on June 7th, wherever you get your podcasts. Dreamtown is great. I was very excited when we first got the pitch for this one. It's a really cool, funny kind of story. That's great. It sounds awesome. All right, let's get to the news. We are now two weeks away from the date our government thinks we won't have enough money to pay our bills, which would trigger an economic catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen. Congress could avert this crisis

by simply voting to raise the debt ceiling like they did when Donald Trump was president. But Republicans now refuse to do so unless Joe Biden agrees to gut a bunch of programs people depend on. Staff for the president and Speaker McCarthy are now engaged in direct negotiations. They've kicked everyone else out of the room. And Biden spoke about their progress on Wednesday, right before he left for the G7 in Japan, a trip he'll now be cutting short to reach a final deal. To be clear, this negotiation is about the outlines of what the budget will look like, not about whether or not we're going to, in fact, pay our debts. The leaders have all agreed we will not default. Every leader has said that.

All right, Dan, on a scale of one to buy gold, how are you feeling right now? 5.263. There was also another headline this morning that Kevin McCarthy is now optimistic that they may reach a deal next week. I didn't see that. Now I'm up to 9.25. Because you can always take what Kevin McCarthy says as certainty. Yeah. We had a White House colleague who was quite smart, but he would always make predictions in very precise decimal numbers. And I asked him why, thinking he had really thought it out. The answer is no. People think you're being more precise if you take it out to the hundredth of a decimal point.

Is that Austin Goolsbee? It sounds like a Goolsbee thing. It was not. It was not. Okay. I won't keep guessing. So as we just heard in that clip, Biden went from saying he won't negotiate over the debt ceiling to cutting his foreign trip short so he can come home and negotiate a budget deal that would presumably include a debt ceiling increase. What happened?

You think he's doing the right thing here? Did he have any other options? I'm not sure he had other options, but let me sort of explain what's happening because I think it is quite confusing. And I would say the press coverage is not really explaining it great because it's largely just taking the talking points that Kevin McCarthy sends them and then putting it to third person and giving it a lead in their room. Well, great.

That's why we have positive Americans. That's why Kirk Media exists, right? So under all scenarios, if the debt ceiling was eliminated, if Biden printed a trillion dollar coin, if it was a 14th Amendment, if Kevin McCarthy folded, under all scenarios, at some point, two or so months from now, the White House, Republicans in the House, and Democrats in the Senate would be involved in a negotiation around the budget for next year. That was going to happen no matter what. And in that scenario, the Democrats were going to have to take some things they did not like. That was decided the moment the Republicans

took the House. They now have a say in it. There are going to be some things we don't want, less betting than we want on something, some other things we don't like. And there will be that negotiation that has happened in divided governments since the beginning of time. And the reason that negotiation would have to end in some kind of a deal is because if it didn't, the government would run out of money and shut down. And while not as harmful as a default on the debt, a government shutdown is still pretty harmful, and it can't go on forever. So at some point, they would have to reach an agreement or else the government would be shut down indefinitely and we couldn't function.

Right. People would be hurt. The economy would be hurt. Individual people's lives would be disrupted. Our ability to respond to crises would be hampered, all of the above. lives would be disrupted, our ability to respond to crises would be hampered, all of the above. What President Biden is trying to do here, and this is a narrow tightrope, is I think, and this is just my supposition, no one at the White House has told me this, that the way President Biden has looked at this is he does not have faith that Kevin McCarthy would be willing to save the government from default if it came down to it, because it would cost him his job. There can be no avoiding of default if Kevin McCarthy does not put a bill on the floor, absent a couple of things we'll talk about in a second.

And so what he's trying to do is help Kevin McCarthy help himself by pulling this negotiation forward that was going to happen anyway, cut that deal, and then would allow Kevin McCarthy to go to his people and say, look at what I got you from the debt ceiling, which is something he actually would have got them anyway later this fall. And so that is what is happening. Now, the challenge here is what happens if they don't have a deal when we get close to that X date? President Biden said in those remarks before he left for Japan that all the leaders have agreed we won't default.

Well, what that means is if we don't have a deal, are they going to do an extension of the debt settlement, even if it's for a short period of time, to buy time to negotiate? And I think if we do not have a deal quickly, that is the next move for the White House is to call for a short-term extension to give them time to finish the negotiation around the budget. And if they won't do that, then we are right back into where we were before, which is looking over the cliff of default. And I think just this week or last week, I can't remember anymore, McCarthy said that he didn't want to do a short-term extension. You could imagine that if they're negotiating and they're somewhat optimistic about the negotiations,

but they just run up to the date and still don't have enough time, then you could imagine McCarthy saying, OK, I'll do a short term extension because at least we're making progress. If Joe Biden had never started negotiations with Kevin McCarthy, I think the scenario is much more likely that McCarthy goes right up to the date and decides that he'll play chicken with Biden and Biden's the one who will blink first because Biden's the responsible adult who doesn't want to tank the economy. And Kevin McCarthy knows that his caucus are a bunch of fucking loonies who would happily tank the economy. I mean, what complicates this sort of I'm negotiating over the budget but not the debt ceiling sort of distinction without difference, we're kind of dancing on the head of a pin here is in a normal budget negotiation, Democrats would ask for one thing, Republicans can ask for another, and we would sort of meet in the middle. The reason why President Obama originally and President Biden this time did not want to negotiate on the debt

ceiling is it should not be a White House ask to not default on the debt that Congress rang up. Like that should not be coming out of President Biden's ledger. And how you keep those things separate in this sort of negotiation is very challenging. We should wait to see what comes out of it before we render judgment on it. But that is what makes this hard. That should be just stipulated. We're just going to tuck that into whatever we agree with. And the White House is going to ask for more funding for health care or something else. Republicans are going to ask for less funding to health care or something else. Republicans are asked for less funding to help feed children or whatever is on brand for them. And then you meet somewhere in the middle. But if it counts as we'll give you non-default if you accept work requirements or something else,

that's an unfair and bad negotiation. Then the White House is in a very, very difficult position. Yeah, this isn't a real negotiation because Republicans haven't offered any concessions whatsoever. Their concession is we won't destroy the global economy if you give us everything that we want. And we don't know what is happening. And so it could turn out this deal ends up quite bad. It could turn out there is no deal. But I think President Biden and his team have earned enough trust from us to see what they actually come up with. And then we can judge that because we don't know what's happening in the room. Are there things they're asking for? Are there things they're getting? Maybe, maybe not. But I think we should just see what happens.

Well, let's talk about what the outlines of a possible deal might look like based on the reporting that we've seen this week. Republicans are demanding across the board spending cuts, clong back unspent COVID funds, permitting reform, which would speed up both fossil fuel projects, but also clean energy projects. And it's actually quite necessary for clean energy projects. And what's become the biggest sticking point, stricter work requirements for people on Medicaid, food assistance and welfare. Democrats in Congress say this is a non-starter, but here's what Biden said on Wednesday and how Kevin McCarthy responded.

I'm not going to accept any work requirements that's going to impact on medical health needs of people. I voted years ago for the work requirements that exist, but it's possible there could be a few others, but not anything of any consequence. A work requirement that accepts not anything of any consequence. Loser. That was someone at Kevin McCarthy's press conference calling Joe Biden a loser for saying he didn't want to accept any work requirements of consequence. What do you make of Biden's position here? It sounds like he's not in quite the same place as congressional Democrats on work requirements, but he's basically taken Medicaid work requirements off the table, but seems like he maybe sort of might be open to modifying the current work requirements that already exist for both food assistance and welfare, which is

known also as uh transition assistance for needy families or tanf thank you for getting a tanf mentioned in this pod uh you know uh wrote a wrote a college thesis on uh on tanf so and and if you describe if you subscribe to the friends of the Pod program, you can read that paper. Anywho, okay. I think let's just stipulate there is no evidence that work requirements help people find work. And they generally make it harder for them to access benefits they need. You're going to hear an interview I did with Anat Shankar Osorio a little later in this pod where she explains that the way we should talk about work requirements is to refer to it as benefit theft, because that's really what it is doing. What I think is happening here, there's a lot of speculation around this, and you keep hearing reporters write and Republicans say that in 1996, Joe Biden voted for Bill Clinton's

relatively atrocious welfare reform bill, and that that is somehow predicts that how we see them at this. I think we should take that off the table. That was nearly 30 years ago. What Joe Biden believed 30 years ago is not what he believes now. This is still the same president who fought very hard for a very expansive program to help the poorest Americans in the American Rescue Plan build back better. We would have one of the most historic programs of all time if Joe Manchin had not sunk it. And what it seems that I'm doing is Biden is looking for deal space here. He is a very seasoned congressional negotiator. And I think McCarthy has probably said, this is a thing I have to have. And Biden is trying to trade something for that, that he wants. What that is, I don't know,

and the devil is going to be in the details here about what it is. But if there is anything that sounds like work requirements can be labeled as work requirements, that Kevin McCarthy can run around with his group of MAGA asshole friends and say, look at the win we got by hurting poor people, that's going to have a lot of blowback on President Biden from Democrats in Congress, and I think progressives and activists around the country. I wanted to get a little on both the politics and the policy of this and how they sort of intersect. And I can talk about the policy. It's not often I get to nerd out on actual policy because I'm usually not that well-versed in a lot of policy, but this one I am. So I think the principle that

our taxes shouldn't go towards assistance for able-bodied adults who could work but refuse to is unsurprisingly popular with people. So they pulled work requirements. 70% of people support work requirements for people on Medicaid, 67% support work requirements for people on food assistance, and 73% for welfare. So that makes helps you understand that McCarthy thinks he's playing a strong political hand and Biden and the White House are like, oh, we're not playing a strong political hand because when people just hear work requirements are like, yeah, of course people should work if they're able to work and they are able to find a job and instead of just being on government assistance. But the truth is 93% of Medicaid

recipients are already either working, attending school, or have a disability. But Arkansas in 2018, they didn't care about that. They decided to pass work requirements for Medicaid anyway. 16,000 people who are in poverty lost their health care. And over 90% of those people who lost their health care because of work requirements were working. And the reason that they lost it is because work requirements are really just additional paperwork requirements. You need more documentation. You need to know how to navigate confusing government websites. And as I said earlier, we already have work requirements for welfare and food assistance.

What Republicans want in this deal, what I've read is they want more paperwork for welfare and to raise the age you're required to work for food assistance from 50 to 55. But again, the people who are getting this assistance are either working, working part-time because that's all they can find, they're between jobs, they're caregiving, or they have health issues that prevent them from working the same jobs they did when they were younger. So it's like the issue here is most of the people that this would hurt are either already working or very much want to work. Right now, there's still like a quarter of all people who are eligible for TANF for welfare don't have it because it's too complicated to get.

And the incentives since Bill Clinton passed welfare reform for welfare workers are to get people off the benefits. And so they make it more confusing. They make the paperwork difficult. There are people who don't have access to the internet. They don't have transportation access. And all these things come into play so that it makes it harder for someone to get benefits. Like for us, you go to the DMV and you spend all day there waiting in a long line and then you get to the front and then you don't have the documentation that you're supposed to. It's happened to all of us. Like you go back home and you can't renew your license that day.

But imagine if that happened and when you went back home, you couldn't have food for a month or health care. Like these are the problems with work requirements. It's not that Joe Biden and the Democrats are against the concept of working or encouraging work. It's that, like Anat probably told you, work requirements are just an excuse for Republicans to push working people into poverty. And if it wasn't an excuse for that, they would get rid of these programs because everywhere it's been tried, they haven't worked. They haven't worked. So I just, you know, it's horrible policy. But you could see you can see where Biden's going on this because there are already work requirements. And what they're trying to do is just

tighten the screws a little more on the requirements and raise the age on food assistance. So it's relatively small, but it's still stupid policy. Because what it comes down to is it's a choice. All these things are choices. Budgets are all about choices and priorities. And one option, which is the one that President Biden and Democrats have pushed, is let's ask the wealthy to pay what they owe, the corporations to pay what they owe, but they're not going to do that. So what's the alternative? Make it harder for poor people to have food and healthcare. That is the choice. And look, I would say for Republicans, they are in it for the kicks. If there was no deficit, they would follow this anyway, because for them, kicking poor people

off health care is just like the friends they made along the way. It's worth it for itself, right? But in this context, it is because they say they care about the deficit. They need savings to say they reduce the deficit or reduce spending, and they won't do it the most obvious ways that would ask their wealthy benefactors to pay a little more, to pay the money they owe. It's also such bullshit. Raising the age from 50 to 55 for food assistance, like that is not – that's going to save you such a tiny amount of money compared to the overall budget. It's just – it's bullshit. So what happens if the White House cuts a deal with McCarthy that a bunch of Democrats in Congress refuse to support? I think that's that's almost certainly going to happen if he cuts a deal with McCarthy. And then I guess they pass it with Republican votes. And I think it ends up being a mix of both because there's no deal. So here's sort of how

the politics lay out. There is no deal that McCarthy will agree on that all the House Democrats will be for or the majority of House Democrats will be for. That's just not possible. The parties are too far apart. And there's no deal that Biden will sign off on that the Democratic Senate will also pass that will appease the Freedom Caucus and others. And so you're in a world where you're going to need like maybe 100 Democrats to be for it to get across the finish line. That's what happened in the both and almost every fiscal negotiation Obama had as well as the far right didn't want to do it. The progressives and the center left and the Democratic Party want to do it.

And then the people who were more moderate or had safer seats or others and still hated the deal voted for it because it was better than default. And that is likely we're in. And that is going to be rough political waters for President Biden because he's going to be in this situation where he – and Obama had this too – where he cannot tout the wins he got because for every time he says it's not that bad, another Republican leaves and it gets that much harder to pass. And so you just have to like eat shit until the US full faith and credit is safe and then try to spin it three days later. And that does not work. Well, so then the question goes to the Democrats who were against, you know, Biden making concessions to McCarthy. So what's your idea? Because otherwise we're going to default and they have two different ideas. The House Democrats are moving a discharge petition that would force a vote on a debt ceiling

increase, though they'd still need six Republicans to make that happen because Democrats only have 212 votes in the House. And that discharge petition won't be ready until the middle of June, which seems like it could be past the X date if the X date really is June 1st, as Janet Yellen says it is. So that's discharge petition. And some Senate Democrats sent Biden a letter yesterday, Wednesday, urging him to declare the debt ceiling is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Elizabeth Warren and some others, Angus King, who's not as progressive and independent from Maine, fiscaliscal hawk also said he thinks the debt ceiling is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. What are your thoughts on either of these plans working, and we've talked about them before, but working at this stage of the process?

I think the – put aside the timing challenge on the discharge position. Let's just say we have enough money to get July 1st or June 27th or whatever. That only worked if there wasn't a negotiation between Biden and McCarthy. Because you're not going to find six members who are going to bail in the middle of the negotiation. Maybe it could work if we get to the end and we're just- That's what I was thinking. Keep doing it. Keep talking about it. Keep pushing it. It's not going to short circuit this negotiation. This negotiation either can produce a, keep pushing it. It's not going to short circuit this negotiation. This negotiation either can produce a deal to avoid default or it's not.

And then we're going to be staring over the cliff. And this is one option on the table. Yeah. If we're staring over the cliff and this is the only and last game in town, then you could imagine in the negotiations just all fall apart. Then you can imagine six Republicans who are in Biden districts thinking, okay, it's either default or this discharge petition to avoid default, and there's no other option at this point. So that remains a live possibility. But the idea that it was the way

it worked, it was a more live possibility in the short term if Biden had stuck with his no negotiation pledge, right? If we were just staring at each other heading towards the cliff, then maybe people would take that off ramp. They're less likely to take it until we're back to the cliff. The 14th Amendment is one of those things that seems great in theory and is very easy to call for if you're not the one who has to make the decision. Being a member of Congress, being a newsletter writer, a podcaster, a tweeter, you can say, that sounds like he should do it. 14th Amendment, we'll show them. If you're the person who took the oath of

office, who is responsible for the well-being of the entire country, not the politics, not the polls, not the 2024 election, but whether millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth is going to be destroyed overnight, are you really going to take a path where the lawyers basically give you the equivalent of the shrug emoji on whether it's going to work? Biden isn't the choice of either. He takes this very risky path that could work, but is high risk and may not work. And if it doesn't work, it would lead to the worst unforced domestic policy error in the history of this country with massive ramifications that could take a decade or more to unwind. How do you make that decision if you're the one who actually make it?

Put it in a press release, put it in a dear colleague letter, tweet about it, write about in your sub stack, talk about it on this podcast. But if you're the person in there, let's make a decision. And you and I were in meetings where some of those things were talked about a decade ago. And it's just as the president who's responsible for the country, that's a very, very, very hard, if not impossible path to take, in my opinion. Yeah, I was trying to game it out. I mean, say he does that. So best case scenario, it goes through the courts, it's upheld, everything's fine, avoided default and

destroyed the debt ceiling is a tool for hostage taking forever which would be amazing that would be a great which would be amazing amazing outcome worst case it goes to the supreme court goes up to the supreme court and the very right wing most extreme right wing court ever says uh no fuck fuck you, Joe Biden. And it's unconstitutional. And then the global economy plunges into crisis. Now, the question there is, do people blame the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court's the one that plunged the economy into crisis? And those are all the headlines? Or do people say that Biden shouldn't have taken it so far? And I don't know the answer to that, but it's still a risk for the Biden administration. I don't even care. And I don't even think Biden even cares or should care

about who gets blamed there. That's not the point when you're the president already. Yeah. And, and even if in the short term, everyone is like, this is Clarence Thomas's fault. And I also fucking hate Mitch McConnell for stealing those seats. And Kevin McCarthy's a doofus. At the end of the day, if all you cared about was the politics by, it still means by hands going to run for reelection in a historic recession. It's not going to be better by November of 2024 if this happens. And so that's how it ends. And so it just seems very – I mean, it is easy to play fantasy football when you're not the person who has to make the decision, who has to bear the responsibility for the actual pain that happens if that plan does not work. And so you might end up

having to take concessions. You do not like to get a deal. You do not like to take on a ton of shit that you do not want or need politically to avoid that fate. That's sort of why Biden's in that room right now. I'm still, I will forever, unless someone explains it to me otherwise, wonder why they didn't try to test out the constitutionality of the debt ceiling before the X date. So then they knew either way. I mean, there is one case already where government employees are suing Janet Yellen for complying with the debt ceiling, arguing that a breach of the debt ceiling would force the president to pick and choose which congressionally authorized payments he would make which is also unconstitutional which they argue is unconstitutional and so i just wonder like which that case had gone through earlier had

been at the court earlier but there's a lot of questions on like who has standing to sue over the debt ceiling because um ignoring the debt ceiling doesn't actually injure anyone, which is why the debt ceiling is so fucking stupid. But it doesn't hurt anyone if you got rid of the debt ceiling, right? It's just a stupid fucking thing that Congress passed. So I wish that we had had some legal judgment on this before we hit the X date. That would have been nice. Well, look, if we want to allocate blame here, the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of two people, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Because as we know, and I think Ron Klain may have told you an interview he did with him, the White House wanted to, in the lame duck, push the debt ceiling out beyond this presidency so that we would not be in this situation.

But you needed 50 Democrats to do that. We did not have 50 Democrats to do that because you're doing it with the previous Congress, not the current one, where we only had 50 votes. And so this is where we are. I think there's going to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, a lot of second-guessing hindsight about how we got here, whatever it happens, whether we default or a deal. Some of it will be completely legitimate. Some of it will certainly not be. But this has to play itself out before we really know whether this was the right approach, the wrong approach, whatever it is. I just think some of the solutions are not as simple as they may seem from afar. All right, happier news. There

were elections on Tuesday that led to some notable results in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. In Florida, Democrat Donna Deegan won a huge upset in the Jacksonville mayor's race, beating the DeSantis endorsed Daniel Davis in a city that's been trending Republican. Also, the largest city in Florida. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I thought Miami was a bigger city than Jacksonville. Jacksonville is a pretty big city. I'm kind of in a position now where if I say I knew that I sound like an asshole. So no, I didn't know it either stupid me in pennsylvania uh democrats won a state legislative special election that prevented the house from flipping republican and in the philadelphia mayor's race cheryl parker won the democratic primary which means she will almost certainly become the city's first black woman to serve as mayor and in kentucky democratic governor andy beshear

will face attorney general daniel cameron endorsed by don, endorsed by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, who beat former Trump official Kelly Craft. A candidate Ron DeSantis endorsed right before the polls closed, who went on to lose by 30 points. Cameron tweaked Tiny D during his victory speech. Let's listen. The Trump culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky. The Trump culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky. This is, of course, mocking Ron DeSantis's, we can't have a culture of losing, oblique shot at Trump that he trotted out over the weekend. What on earth was DeSantis thinking? Endorsing someone right before the polls closed who went on to lose by 30 points?

I don't understand. This is truly one of the stupidest things I've ever seen anyone do. He should fire his team and then shoot himself directly into the sun for just rank political incompetence. So how did this happen, right? Here's the question. Because he obviously knew Kraft was going to lose.

But why did he endorse Kraft? When it made no difference? When voters wouldn't even know about it when they voted? Which is a real statement on how little political influence he has relative to Trump in his own mind. Two reasons. One, Kelly and Joe Kraft, Joe Kraft is Kelly's husband, are billionaire coal barons. And Joe Kraft is a donor to DeSantis and likely a donor to a DeSantis super PAC when and if he runs. That's reason one. Reason two is that Kraft's strategist is Jeff Rowe, who is this Republican wunderkind who helped elect Youngkin and it was a big coup that the DeSantis world got Jeff Rowe to come work for them. And so he clearly used his connections to DeSantis to deliver this endorsement even at the

last minute. I'm sure he promised Kelly Craft when he took the job that he would eventually get DeSantis. DeSantis finally gave him the last minute. He should fire Jeff Rowe for this because it's complete grift where he abused his relationship with DeSantis to get this endorsement. And so the whole thing speaks very poorly of the reportedly very soon to launch DeSantis presidential campaign. They don't know what they're doing. They got a bunch of people in it just trying to use DeSantis for influence and money and building their client roster. Yeah. Ron DeSantis is announcing next week, according to the Wall Street Journal today. What do you think about his culture of losing argument? I think he's taken this thing about Ron DeSantis culture warrior a little too literally.

I think he's taken this thing about Ron DeSantis' culture warrior a little too literally. If you want to run as a winner, you have to stop losing. And he has done nothing but lose since he won re-election in 2022. And he keeps going around saying the implication of the culture of losing is that Donald Trump is a shitty candidate. And he may be right about that, but it's hard to say that Trump's a shitty candidate when that shitty candidate is kicking Ron DeSantis' ass in all the polls. So it's not really – he's going to – something has to change for that to work, and right now it's not working at all. Yeah, I mean he has to make a direct argument that Donald Trump suffered two historic midterm losses, one in which he wasn't even on the ticket but made himself a central character in the race and lost in 2020 which he you know still can't seem to say i i think eventually he'll get there or at the very least i mean again at the very least even if he doesn't want to piss off all the election deniers in the party which is a lot of the party now he could say like whether or not you think donald

trump won that election he should have won that election and it should never have been that close he could say that just doesn't want to say it. It's your best argument. He is trying to be more likable though. Here's a clip from him last week. How about that laugh, Dan? I mean, what a weirdo. What a weirdo. Taking that likable on the top of his debate prep a little too far. I mean, not to use a dated political reference, which is sort of the brand of the Thursday podcast, but it's... I mean, it's a very Howard Dean moment from 2004. And, you know, this is an audio format, but the video of it is even...

He looks even weirder in the video, is what's important to know about that. You just see Elijah cringe in the you as you call this an audio format for those of you who are listening in the audio format i would just say that this is such a video format that before we got started elijah critiqued the choice of blinds in this room well i think they're fine yeah so i mean andy did as well uh but elijah did not like them and i will be reporting him directly to holly who is not going to be happy about that critique. Yikes. Back to Kentucky.

As red as it gets, but doesn't it seem like Andy Beshear might be the favorite in the governor's race? I think the most popular governor in the country? I think favorite's doing a lot of work there. I think he has a very, very real shot of getting reelected in what is likely to be a very, very close race in a very Republican state. And the fact that you can say that sentence speaks to his political brand and strength, because a Democrat should be getting crushed in an off year in a state that Trump won by 26 points. But he has done a great job as governor. He has remained quite popular in a very Republican state, but

it's going to be a very tough race. Yeah, and that's why everyone needs to help out. Go to votesaveamerica.com. We're going to be helping out with the Kentucky governor's race and all the 2023 off-year elections. That's one of the bigger ones. Were you surprised by the outcome of the Philly mayor's race, considering how much attention progressive star Helen Gimm got? No, I knew it was going to happen, and I knew Jacksonville was the largest city in Florida. Wow.

No, I was surprised. Because if you followed all the news and the Twitter commentary, not the local news, but sort of the national political conversation about this race, it was all about Helen Gim. I think this is once again a reminder that the Democratic base, the real base where the votes are delivered, which for the state of Pennsylvania is in Philly, is much more ideologically complex and in many cases moderate on some issues than the Twitter, cable, podcast conversation would have you believe. And we've seen that come to bear in the New York mayor's race a couple years ago. We saw it in how the Chicago mayor's race played out, even if the progressive won in the end. And it happened here as well. And this is a big deal. This is the first black woman

mayor in the history of the city of Philadelphia. We should be celebrating that. She is as exciting candidate as could be. I was digging into some of the numbers on it. Helen Gimm's highest share of the vote came from people making over $100,000. And in terms of where she did well, she performed best by University of Pennsylvania near that campus. Parker got the highest share of her vote from people making under $50,000. making under $50,000. So, you know, some people thought that Helen Gimm much would be like Brandon Johnson in Chicago, a progressive who would beat a more moderate candidate to win the mayor's race. The difference with Brandon Johnson is Brandon Johnson built a coalition that included college educated whites, wealthier liberals, but also black voters. And in Philadelphia, Helen Gim just had the highly educated, wealthier white liberals

and didn't combine it with the black vote. And that's the difference right there. I mean, there is one other fundamental difference that I think is just, because it's always too easy to draw a big conclusion on these things – is that in the Chicago race had a one-on-one runoff between Vallis and Johnson. And here, this is a multi-candidate race with no runoff. So it put particular value in a consolidation of the black vote in a city with a large working class black population. Yes, that is very true. Any other takeaways from election day this week?

Just Democrats have transitioned into a party that has a very high rate of turnout in off-year elections. We have become a high turnout party. And you see this in special elections, you saw it in the midterms, you see it here. Ten years ago, we were a presidential election year party. And we now have a larger percentage of our base that is turning out in non-presidential election years. And it's giving us real strength down ballot in some of these elections like the Pennsylvania special election, the Jacksonville mayor's race. And it is ultimately you have to – there's a lot of work to do to expand our coalition, to have a true governing coalition geographically across the country. But sustainable, progressive political power is built at the state level. And if you want to do that, you have to turn out in these non-presidential years.

And that is happening. And I think it's a real positive sign. I will say in Jacksonville, the electorate in this race that Donna Deegan won was more Republican than last time a Republican won the mayor's race. So how did she win then? She won because she got enough Republicans to vote for her. There was enough crossover support. She was able to persuade Republicans to vote for her because she's a more moderate candidate and the Republican she framed as an extreme right wing candidate. And so, again, we've said it a million times, like turnout incredibly important and also persuasion is incredibly important. And you can't be given up on convincing Republican or lean Republican or independent voters to vote for you because both things are key to win a race. Speaking of elections, the most definitive account of what happened in the 2022 midterms is finally out.

The data firm Catalyst maintains the longest running voter file outside the two political parties, which makes their insights much more accurate than exit polls. Few the major findings about 2022 are. One, you just mentioned this, turnout was higher than any midterm election other than 2018. And Democrats won the majority of heavily contested races to Gen Z and millennial voters combined actually exceeded their 2018 record breaking turnout by 6 percent. And 65 percent of them supported Democratic candidates. Three election denying MAGA candidates did one to four points worse than other Republicans. And four, the 2020 Biden coalition basically stayed the same, with two notable exceptions.

Democratic support among white, non-college-educated women rose 4%, and turnout among black voters fell and contested races. What's your take on the data, and did anything else stand out to you? fell and contested races. What's your take on the data and did anything else stand out to you? The data paints a very, I think, positive and encouraging picture for 2024. There's obviously a lot of work to do there. Even midterms, as high as it turned out it was in this midterm, there are still a whole ton of people who are going to sign the presidential election who were not in this election, but the strength of the Democratic coalition stays strong. The second piece that I think is really notable and important is the centrality of continuing to brand correctly the Republicans as extremists and particularly extremists on issues like abortion. Because if you can take those

gains you have made with white women who didn't go to college, with the surge in voter registration among women that they found in this study after the Roe v. Wade decision and keep pushing it forward as around the country, whether it's in Florida or North Carolina or elsewhere, that Republicans are continuing to push incredibly extreme, cruel, and dangerous decisions on abortion. It is a boost to what we are seeing, which is an anti-MAGA majority in the country, but particularly in the battleground states that will decide the presidential election and decide the Senate in 2022. And what is, I think, most useful about this study is that in the 2022 election, there was almost one-for-one overlap between where

the races were for governor and Senate and the ones that will decide the presidency. Oftentimes, they're not, you know, it's about Maine or these other states that are not in play in the presidential, but here it is. We're talking about Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan. That's it. That's the battleground right there. For me, it was a reminder that campaigning really works. It sounds sort of obvious. But the difference between contested areas and uncontested areas, whether those uncontested areas were blue or red, Democrats performed as you would imagine they perform in a midterm election where they're the party in power, meaning there was basically a red wave in those areas where there were not seriously contested races. In contested races where we had candidates and campaigns and we were on TV and we were knocking on doors, it really worked, even in the toughest contested areas. So I think that was important. I do think that, you know, black turnout and black support are issues, especially among younger

black voters. That's where we saw the biggest drop off, though. Notably, it was less of an issue in the two races in Georgia, both the governor's race and the Senate race and North Carolina, the Senate race where we lost when black candidates were running at the top of the ticket. We didn't see as much drop off or in both turnout and support in those races. So that's something for Democrats to certainly think about and also cannot give up on white non-college educated voters. They made up a third of the Democrats winning coalition in 2022. That's more than it was in 2020 when Biden won some voters back, white working class voters back from when Hillary ran in 2016. And we saw in 2020, 2022, support for Democrats rose among non-college educated white women, which, you know,

Celinda Lake always tells us is like a key swing group. And there's plenty of reasons for that. I think abortion is a huge one. I also think sort of like economic reasons as well. But, you know, this idea that we should that these are all Trump voters and we should give up on them. It's just not it hasn't borne out in all of the data we've seen in every election since 2016. It's just hasn't borne out. So, yeah, those are those are all those are all my takes on this. Do you think that the 2022 results and the data from Catalyst can tell us anything about where the electorate's going to be heading into 2024? I would think of it less as telling us where the electorate's

going to be than giving us a list of things we should work on in preparation for 2024. One you mentioned, which was some concerning numbers with Black voters in places other than Georgia and North Carolina. Two, the Latino vote stayed basically equivalent to where it was in 2020. But that is still a nine-point drop in support levels for Democrats from where it was in 2016. If we want to have any margin for error and put some other states like Texas in play, we have to start getting that number.

Stopping it from falling is step one. Getting it back up to where it was is step two. And so that's point two. Point three is we won this election because of large turnout from Gen Z and millennials. And as you would point out, millennials are not that young anymore. But this is the core of the Democratic Party. We have to make sure we have that turnout going forward and thinking about how are we communicating with those people in a media environment where our traditional tools,

other than very popular progressive podcasts, do not reach that group? How are we going to navigate that with an 80-year-old president? That cannot fall by the wayside and should be top of mind. And as we know, it is top of mind of the Biden folks as they're thinking about it. But those would be the top three things on my punch list in thinking about how we replicate the 2022 success in 2024. Yeah, certainly some good news in the data, but plenty to keep us all up at night. When we come back, Dan will talk to Anat Shankar-Osorio about economic messaging and the debt ceiling. Joining us now is one of the Democratic Party's best minds on political messaging and an all-around friend of the pot, Anat Shankar Osorio. Anat, it's great to have you back.

Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. All right. We are talking here on a Thursday. We are like two or so weeks away from quote unquote X date when we could face our first ever default in U.S. history. You've done a lot of thinking about how Democrats should be talking about this battle over default. What's your advice? Well, first, I'm thrilled to hear you say the word default, because let me knock off a bunch of don'ts before we get to some do's. Number one, don't don't call it the debt ceiling. I realize we can't control what the media says, but calling it the debt ceiling just reinforces to voters this idea of profligate spending and the fact that we're always in debt. Don't try the

hypocrisy argument. We love it makes us feel good never ever works. By that I mean, they voted to raise the debt ceiling a million times before and they did it under Trump and they've done it before. Actually, what we find when we test that is it backlashes hard. Again, it's that reminder that we are or that feeling that we are perennially irresponsible. And we just keep putting ourselves into this situation. On the do side, which is obviously the more important side, definitely talking about it as default, definitely making clear that there are villains here. So for example, if MAGA Republicans block our government from paying America's bills, millions of families won't be able to pay ours. So really putting into stark relief,

what is this abstract seeming thing? Also saying, for example, MAGA Republicans are threatening to default on America, that phrase default on America, unless they can take away what Americans need in order to be able to explain what I also call the your money or your life offer, quote unquote offer that McCarthy is putting forward. What is always challenging, and I've been through a couple of these from my time in the administration, is you have this question of default and the mechanisms by which you afford default. And then there is this separate thing that is also taking place in this context around spending and spending cuts and what the Republicans want and what Democrats don't want. And I know they're all sort of mixed together in how it's covered. But in the context of spending cuts, there's lots of polling that shows that abstractly people think government spends too much, deficits are a concern. How do

you think Democrats should talk about that and what they are fighting against in terms of spending? Is it specific programs? What does your research show? Yeah, great question. It is a very complicated tale to tell. I know, I think the first line of answer, which you already know, is don't get into the details. People don't need to know the details and they cannot sort of process and absorb. It also hinders our ability to just do a compact kind of message if we try to go through it. But that said, to directly answer your question, the number one rule is we don't need to repeat what they say, right? So McCarthy, for example, introduces the notion of work, quote,

work requirements, and how we need to have work requirements. And our instinctive response is to say, these work requirements are terrible, these work requirements are going to harm people. These work requirements, X, Y, Z. And there I go repeating what work requirements, which is something that broadly speaking, many, many Americans actually favor because they have been taught to worship at the altar of work will set you free. Where have I seen that phrase before? So instead, we can call them, for example, benefits theft. Basically, McCarthy wants to take away benefits, the care, public education, veterans services that Americans need, and that we support, so that he can hand kickbacks, hand dollars to his donors. We always want to get in that piece of what I call ascribing motivation.

So making it clear the why behind what they're doing, not just the what. I think if a White House staffer or a member of Congress or someone's listening to this, they would say, that's great. I totally agree. a member of Congress or someone who's listening to this, they would say, that's great. Like, I totally agree. In my tweet about this, I can write benefit theft or whatever else, but the press is just going to write work requirements.

And that is the primary vehicle for which most voters are still getting, to the extent that they are following this, and polls show they're not following it that closely. That could change as we get closer to default. But if they're getting information about it, it is being framed in ways in which we have no control. Do you have thoughts on how to push that back or how to navigate the challenges of the media

environment we're in? Yeah. I mean, this is the however many million, maybe billion dollar question and probably part of the ethos and the idea behind Crooked Media, if I can sort of blow sunshine at you. Always, always, you know, the media is sort of both sides in the us off of finance off of the financial cliff and into complete economic shutdown, because they are more wedded to reporting on point of process and horse race rather than actual stakes, you know, doesn't make any sense, but is what happens. So a couple of points of advice. Number one, we don't have control over

what the opposition says. We don't have control over what the mainstream media says. The only thing we have control over is what we say. And so I would still reinforce and deliberately repeat because repetition is important. And so I'm being repetitious in order to repeat that notion that still we have to stick with our thing. And I think that the widespread usage of default and defaulting on America is already a sign that we can push back on the phrase that is sort of closest to top of mind, which is debt ceiling. And I'm not saying the media has changed, but that is a far more widespread thing. So how do we make the work requirements, for example, default, no longer be the default. So the media says to you as a member of Congress, or, you know, as someone who is being quoted, hey, what do you think about these work

requirements? You know, my advice for what to say back is, I think most of us in America, and certainly my voters and my constituents that I talk to across my district, believe that most of us are just here because we want to care for our families and leave things off for generations to come. But today, McCarthy and his MAGA Republicans want to steal benefits from Americans who work day in and day out, whether that's caring for our kids, or whether that's punching in and out at a nine to five. He wants to be able to hand kickbacks to his donors while he screws the rest of us. Basically, just coming back again to why he's doing this rather than belaboring whether work requirements are good, work requirements are bad, they're obnoxious, they're not obnoxious, just not taking the bait.

In your phraseology, there is the kickbacks to his donors. Is that specifically in reference to tax cuts to the rich and corporations? Absolutely. Okay. So I mean, that is one way in which to do this is there's a, you know, everyone wants to get our, you know, you would know the right phrase. But once we have fallen and Biden has put himself in this position on the idea that we have to deal with deficits over time, it's a question of how. Because, I mean, the public does agree with that,

even if they have always and, you know, they just want to cut foreign does agree with that, and they have always. And they just want to cut foreign aid and waste foreign abuse and keep everything else, while also spending more money in the military, whatever the public wants. But now you're in this world of, how do you do it? And our way includes asking the wealthy and corporations to pay more. They will refuse to do that. They will refuse to do that. Because they refuse to do that, they have to do X, Y, and Z, right? Which can be cut Medicare and Social Security, benefit theft, in your phrase, or something like that.

That is sort of the... Once we're in that world, is that the way to do it? About two different approaches? Yeah. I mean, you may argue with me, and it's a credible claim to make that what I'm about to say is so fantastical, it leaves the realm of possibility. I personally feel very strongly that we shouldn't be worshiping at the altar of we also want to tackle the deficit, we also want to deal with the debt. Because first of all, you know, if you believe

in modern monetary theory, I think that that's pretty silly. And from a language perspective, not a policy perspective or econ perspective, if we tell the public that what we need you to focus on, what we need you to think about, what is most important here is who is going to deliver to you the greatest cuts to the deficit, then that is advantage team, cut, cut, cut. And regardless of what is actually factually true, and the way that we, you know, yell and scream, because it is true, that they're the ones that actually pile onto the deficit with

their tax cuts, and there are various kinds of spending, the public perception is what the public perception is, as you have rightly laid out and know. So when we get into that trap of, you know, we also want to cut the deficit and these are the ways that we're going to cut the deficit. I just think we're handing them the advantage and where we need to keep the discourse is. And, you know, I'm going to bring up a word that you and I are both very, very into, which is freedoms. We need to talk about how we need to make the freedom case in the economic realm. So this idea as ever that we value our freedoms, but a wealthy few have always tried calling the shots, rigging the rules to avoid paying what they owe. That, by the way, pay what they owe rather than ask them to contribute their fair

share much stronger language. Pay what they owe rightly implies that they've been skating by and skirting what is due as opposed to now a new asking them to chip into the pot. So the idea with that, that the wealthy few have always tried calling the shots and now MAGA Republicans want to default on America and push us into economic showdown unless we let them take away our health care, our school funding, jobs from families. That is where we need the argument to be, that basically this is same as it ever was, perennially MAGA Republicans jumping to do the bidding of billionaires and trying to put our families into peril and making the call be protect our families from the MAGA default.

And one last question for you. The Republican primary is heating up. We're seeing sort of a race to the bottom between Trump and DeSantis and all these candidates to be the most outrageous, most MAGA extreme Republican possible. We have state legislators and other Republican politicians doing just absolutely unheard of offensive things on book bans and attack on trans kids and attack on women's freedom and all of the above. For Democrats trying to highlight Republican extremism, it is a target rich opportunity. What is your advice on how we do that without simply being a response mode? Is there a way that you would recommend to build a coherent narrative about who the Republicans are to fit all of these things into? Yeah, I'm so glad that you're asking. One of the things that we see over and over again, and it was really a hallmark of the Trump years, is that when we go after folks for, you know,

the daily assault, and at 10am, it's this and at 1020, it's that and at 1030, and so on and so forth, we actually lose the big picture. And what voters take away from that is, first of all, they can't remember what's going on. And second of all, it really feels to them like, oh, that's just politics as usual. That is where team blue says crappy things about team red and vice versa. And sort of the slings and arrows don't land. So what we have to do, and it's tough, is discipline ourselves to actually not talk about every single one of these things as a separate one-off, and can you believe they did this? And can you believe they said that? And can you believe, and can you believe, and can you believe? But rather, as you just articulated, come up with one overarching charge. And the ones that

we are seeing still pop, because we are hot in the middle of this, especially in preparation for the slew of Supreme Court badness that is coming our way. We're just in the field of this, especially in preparation for the slew of Supreme Court badness that is coming our way. We're just in the field looking, looking, looking at what is this overarching story. The ones are popping to the top, unsurprisingly, a continuation of what we saw work in 22, which is they want to take away your freedoms from the freedom to love who you love, to read what you want to read, for your kids to learn the truth of our past, the freedom to love who you love, to read what you want to read, for your kids to learn the truth of our past, your freedom to decide whether and when to have kids, your freedom to be with your partner, your freedom to parent how you see fit, and raise your kids

according to your own values, which of course is a charge that they make against us. So again, that loss aversion, weaving in the economics, they want to take away your freedom to earn a good living, they want to take away your freedom to retire in dignity, and so on. So it doesn't just apply on the social side. Another way of doing it another kind of overarching storyline that's really popping is this idea of control. So they want to control us. They want to decide our futures for us. They want to take us backward to a time where they call the shots and they can hand back whatever they want to their wealthy donors while telling us who we can be, what we can do, where we can go, and what we can say. So taking away our freedoms, trying to control us and decide our futures for us. Those

are two kind of ways to tell the full story and fit the particular for instances in it. Anat, thank you so much. Please tell our listeners where they can follow you and get more information on your messaging advice. Yeah, I appreciate it. So I tweet often good messaging sometimes as I like to say, tweet as I say not as I do. Sometimes I'm just firing off because I'm pissed at a not Oh, Soros like the name of the dinosaur. Since my last name is Osorio. And then I also have a podcast, each episode of which traces a win, a happy thing, something we won somewhere in the world and how we did it. And that's called Words to Win By. Anat, thank you so much. And I'm sure we will talk to you again soon.

Thank you again for having me. All right, we're back. And with us in studio in Los Angeles, Elijah Cohn. He finally left your little room in North Carolina where you spend all your time. Yeah, I'm in that room or a plane on my way out here. Those are the two places. We haven't played a take game in a while, so this is great. Yeah, I'd love to tell you why.

I'd love to tell the audience why, if that's okay. Please do. I've been working on the subscription service. I've been working on Friends of the Pod. There you are. And I'm very biased, but I think it's great. I would encourage you to go join the Discord. I think it's the platonic ideal of social media, especially in Elon's Twitter.

And, uh, I will just say, I spent some time in the discord. Fantastic people. Great community. Yep. Everyone has,

it's not just cause they're all, they're like friends of the pod and have nice things to say. The criticisms are well-founded, well thought out. Frequent. Yeah. But like, it's, it's much different than than twitter it's much yes it's like night and day from the annoying people on twitter absolutely and then we got this show we're making we're recording another episode right after this terminally online i won't say it's a good show but we have a lot of fun making it and i'm

gonna post some clips on social media so go check those out if you want a taste for what it is and go sign up. I would say it's a great show. Yeah, it's a great show. Today's going to be great. Yeah, Dan's doing it today. And I am coming in hot today. We're recording Terminally Online today. You probably won't hear it until, I don't know when it comes out.

Saturday. Saturday. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's right up against Love It or Leave It. Don't tell him. Oh, Jesus. You really can't. Yeah, you really can't. He won't hear it here because he don't tell him oh jesus you really can't yeah you really he

won't he won't hear it here because he doesn't listen to this question no dan don't write about it in message uh crooked.com slash friends john and dan please say crooked.com slash friends crooked.com slash friends crooked.com slash friends great let's play the game welcome back to take take don't tell me So I'm going to present you all with five news stories, and then you'll have to rank them from best to worst with the worst take being number one. Okay. Here's the catch. You don't know which takes are coming. So be careful to not fill that number one slot too early. Are you both ready? I'm so'm so ready great let's do it dan are you ready i didn't let you say well if i said no what would happen i'd wait i don't know so yes i'm ready as i'm gonna

be so let's start with a piece from politico it's about vivek number one ramaswamy yeah do you know what you said politico and i was triggered yes wow so vivek ramaswamy. Yeah. Do you know what this one is? You said Politico and I was triggered. Yes. Wow. So Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. If you aren't familiar, his background is that he's rich and he hates wokeness. That's it.

This piece is titled. All right. I'm interested. Nine ways. Nine ways Vivek Ramaswamy can beat Donald Trump. According to Andrew Yang. Dan, nine ways vivek ramaswamy can beat donald trump according to andrew yang dan this is like a piece called how to win a game seven according to doc rivers do you think that was that necessary was it necessary i didn't say anything you didn't i don't think most of our audience will get that but whatever well i would at least this piece i

will just at least suffer i will submit, I congratulate the Celtics fans for winning yet again. They will always be better than the Sixers. I would just say that on Sunday, I watched game seven and I- I saw you tweeting. You seemed so upset.

Yes. I just said, just stay back. I watched the Sixers just absolutely shit the bed in the most epic way possible. And then later that day, I ripped my large toenail off by accident,

not on purpose. And I would say that that was the toenail was the second most painful thing that happened that day. You also don't realize how often your children stand up, step on your toes until you rip your toenail off. Oh my God. Anyhow, get back to your show,

get back to your show with your unnecessary day, unnecessary, but fair dig on Doc Rivers and the Sixers. Sorry to kick you while you're down. So this piece from Andrew Yang is in listicle format. So there are some big picture pieces of advice followed by paragraphs. I'd like to, for the quote, just share you a couple of those big picture pieces of advice. Number one, be prepared for the debates.

Number five, lean into memes no yeah number six talk more about ai and ubi oh my god and last certainly not least number nine stay human okay i mean this is real you've done a great job here. Politico, Vivek Ramaswamy, Andrew Yang, and the most banal fucking advice I've ever heard. It's going to be hard to keep this out of one. That's why I put it first. Do John and I have to agree? These take games are all sort of a mishmash in my mind, or do we each pick our own?

Well, there's compromise. I mean, like like you know you can give kevin mccarthy like leaks that you feel good about the number one position but no the other side can leak other things where i mean you don't want to put it at number one it sounds like i feel like we should do it at number two i think we just got to give ourselves some strategically we gotta give us some room i was thinking the same thing i feel like i feel like number two is safe or the safest the safest option cool so at number two we have vivek can win according to andrew yang a loser uh with all due respect i could say i could i could hear the respect yes uh next take is from the new york times it's from this week cancel your subscription sorry it's uh titled legalizing marijuana is a big

mistake uh this piece argues that it's for context it's from ross do do that doubt that i never never you know you don't you don't know how you don't have to you don't have to better that way yeah the piece argues that marijuana legislation uh or legalization is presenting challenges and therefore we should make it illegal again. The framing of this piece, I think, is what's worth quoting. Here we go. There have been moral arguments about the excesses of the drug war and medical arguments about the potential benefits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pitted the chill against the uptight, the cools against the squares, and the relaxed future against the principal skinners of the past. I mean, I think that's right.

Yeah. He seems like all of those things on the other side of the debate. That's true. As do the people who don't want to legalize weed. So I don't know. I think I might put that in the five. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I would say that Ross Douthat has a series of takes that put him in the principal skinner school of things on a whole list of things. You can Google them if you would like. I'm not gonna mention them on this podcast, but they're not super cool. Yeah, he had a horrifically bad one a couple weeks ago that I am struggling to remember. All I remember is a lot of people complaining about it, which tells you everything you need to know about Twitter. okay cool new york times at number five weed is only legal because it's cool that's that's not really what he said i'm gonna frame it that way as for shorthand sure let's go to the wall street journal here's a piece i love this genre titled if biden bows out

how about michelle obama how about it uh's a quote. According to a Zogby Analytics poll released last year, it found that if Mr. Biden were to bow out in 2024, the favorite to replace him is the only Democrat with broad national appeal, Michelle Obama. I should say this piece, I don't remember how you feel about all of these authors but this piece is by douglas schoen and andrew stein oh wow doug schoen yeah he's uh he's like a mark penn partner or it was at one some point i don't know if he still is former clinton guy yeah what do you think dan i so we have used slot two and slot five is that where we are Yeah. I think this is probably a four. You're kind of mailing it in. Yeah. Doug Shone, every cycle, writes a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling on someone new to run or someone to drop out.

He and Mark Penn, I think, together, or at least Doug Shone was involved in an op-ed calling on Barack Obama to not run for re-election so Hillary Clinton could back around this time in 2011 or so. I think he did a similar. He called for someone else to drop out recently. Like this is his thing. He's kind of mailing it in. It's very possible he's using Chet GPT to do this. So I say four. Yeah, I agree. I mean the chances of Michelle Obama doing that are zero.

If it was possible to be less than zero, I would go with less than zero. But if you looked at not just a Zogby analytics poll, but every kind of poll, she is probably the most popular figure in the party, maybe even more so than her husband. Yeah. So no chance she's running. They said in the piece

she's not interested in running at all. No, because she sort of despises politics. That's a big problem with her getting in the race. Probably a source of her popularity. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Well, we have at number two, Politico.

Vivek can win, according to Andrew Yang. At four, Wall Street Journal. What about Michelle Obama? And at five, New York Times. Weed is only legal because it's cool. This is one from the washington post the next one uh it's a piece titled the durham report is a damning indictment of the fbi and the media now i have an explanation here but do you do one of you guys want to explain what the durham report

is it's an go ahead john i was gonna make a du basketball joke, but it's not even I'm tapped out on basketball content for this pod. Donald Trump to dig into the supposedly unfair investigations into Donald Trump found after many years and a lot of, you know, investigation, no crimes or brought, I think, brought three indictments. Two were found not guilty and one pled guilty immediately. So they didn't go. And they were all for like minor things. And basically the conclusion was the FBI seemed to rush into this investigation and there was a few things that they did wrong, but it didn't knock down the basis for the investigation in any real way. So it's bullshit. And somehow Republicans are still holding it up as like proof that Donald Trump was unfairly, you know, investigated. It just seems like fucking crazy. uh you know investigated it just seems like fucking crazy yeah i'd written here in my own words it's a partisan hack job commissioned to counter the muller report was my yeah that seems good cool well here's a wild wild quote from the piece which is from uh take favorite mark tyson um the report shows that people have lost trust in the media rightfully so why did trump supporters

storm the capitol because they believe trump's false claims that the election was being stolen and why did they believe him if the media lied to them about trump's collusion with russia why should they trust the reports that trump's election claims were false oh my god mark tyson what do you think dan it feels like it's a number three, but I'm worried about what the last one is going to be and if it can beat the Andrew Yang thing. I think we took a bet.

We took a gamble that there would be one better than this. This is not better than the Andrew Yang boring advice column. And if it's not, maybe we should just go with what we truly believe which is if it's not better it should be three I think it should be three we just got to roll the dice and hope that we get a good one and if we don't this is a fake game with

right except for it's a fake game with no stakes so what really is that going wrong here I am feeling the stakes it's yeah what are the stakes Doc Rivers was feeling the stakes Wow I just cannot believe i'm being trolled by a charlotte hornet fan right now i'm less nba fan uh so to recap the number one slot is open number two is vivek can win number three is jan 6 is the fbi slash media's fault uh number four is what about michelle obama number five is weed it's only legal because it's cool.

The good thing about number one is that it's unconventional. It's what you make of it because it's not really a take. It's a tweet from Mike Pence. It's simply a photo of Mike Pence inside a Dunkin' Donuts in New Hampshire. It's a very awkward photo. John's holding up his Dunkin'. So here's a text from the tweet that goes along with the photo. I heard New Hampshire in America run on at Dunkin' Donuts. Had to check it out for myself.

American flag emoji. The take is the implicit idea that this is what Pence needs to do to contend in 2024 and that this was good by his staff. Where do you guys want to rank it? Also just the idea that he just discovered. Hey, I heard that America runs on Dunkin'. Yeah, have you heard of this new coffee shop that's sprouting up all over the country?

It's called Dunkin' Donuts. Yeah, at Dunkin' Donuts, tagging the brand. And not even, did he use the donut emoji or just American flag? Just the American flag emoji. Yeah, I mean, it's not that, I would not have made it number one. I would have made the Andrew Yang one number one. But I probably would have made this three.

This could be two. I think this could be two. It could be two. It's pretty ridiculous. When you really dig into this weird human being-like thing that is Mike Pence with no personality and no connection to culture or anything thinking he has discovered a secret local New Hampshire donut place.

Called, called, called Duncan donuts. What is this? And there's no G look at that guys. These New Hampshireites are crazy. Also, did you hear America runs on this?

Crazy. That snappy new slogan? Yeah, it's like when Michael Scott goes to New York and he's like, I got my local pizza joint here and it's Sparrow. Is this what Mike Pence needs to win? No, Mike Pence needs his voters not to want to hang him. And I don't think that this is this is

moving them in that direction do they sell I think I think after seeing this tweet more people are going to want to hang Mike Pence like what like who Starbucks fans just like Howard Schultz people who do social media the people who run Pete's cool well the final rankings are Mike Pence saying Mike Pence runs on Duncan Politico Vivek can win according to Andrew Yang Washington Post January 6th is the media's fault Wall Street Journal what about Michelle

Obama and New York Times weed is only legal because it's cool how do we feel overall about these rankings I feel like you did a great job giving us Andrew Yang early because it threw us off our game. And that is one of the... And I got to go back now and read the whole piece just to get mad because that's fun to get mad.

I could have read all nine. I was going to say, but just the ones you chose are some of the worst takes we've ever heard on this program. Lean into memes. I think, John, we like philadelphia 76ers who lose big games like we just lost a big game it's important to go back and reevaluate what went wrong and we should go with our gut our gut was that was one and we overthought it and we should have known that this the cto over here would have put the one the first number one take first to fuck with

our heads and we just didn't do it so we didn't do it that's so that's on us that's on us we'll get them next year god i owned you guys that was intentional too but i know we should have known i know we should have known you figured it out you figured it out uh elijah thank you for uh letting us lose at uh take take don't tell me thank you also to anat shankar osorio for joining us everyone have a great weekend and we'll talk to you next week bye everyone crooked.com slash friendsoked.com slash friends. Crooked.com slash friends. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our producers are Andy Gardner Bernstein and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefko, and David Toles. Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com slash at Pod Save America.